by Susan Sey
Willa pushed the safety glasses to the top of her head, wrapped the cord around the saw and tucked it back into her bag. “Now we wait.”
Bianca frowned. “How long?”
Willa shrugged and hitched herself onto a sturdy table. She let her boots dangle and gave Bianca a guileless smile. “As long as it takes.”
“Well, how long do you usually wait?” Bianca asked, all exaggerated patience.
“Depends on how long that little fella’s been in your wall. If he’s hungry—” Which she kind of thought he was, given the panic she’d sensed earlier. “—it’ll be sooner rather than later.” She pointed at the gob of peanut butter sitting in the back corner of the trap. “That’s an invitation he won’t be able to resist.”
Bianca sighed. She propped an elbow on the stack of boxes Willa had moved and turned her attention to the trap as if she could force rodents out of her wall through sheer will power. If anybody could do such a thing, Willa thought, it was Bianca Davis.
The emergency exit swung open suddenly and Matty Davis appeared. The youngest Davis was all enormous shoes and perfect cheekbones as he wrestled his lanky teenaged body, a duffle bag, and a lacrosse stick through the narrow doorjamb.
“Hey, Mom,” he said to Bianca while Willa’s heart tried to leap out of her chest. She drank in the sight of him. She had so few opportunities to study him up close. He was almost fourteen now and so tall, probably approaching six feet. Skinny as a rail, though, and still learning to manage his newly endless limbs. His face was pure Diego, Willa had to admit, from those cheekbones to all that dramatic black hair, and lord knew that always put a cramp in Willa’s stomach. But those gun-metal gray eyes weren’t Diego’s and there was a sweetness in them that Diego had never possessed. It eased Willa’s stomach but it also opened up a pit of yearning in her soul that had never, not in all the years it had existed, shrunk a single inch.
“Hey, Ms. Zinc.”
“Hey, Matty,” she managed over her stupid heart wedged in her mouth.
He eyed the hole in the wall and the empty trap. “What’s going on?”
“There’s a thing in the wall,” Bianca told him. “Willa’s getting it out. Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah. The bus leaves the school at two. I’m heading up there now.”
“You have your passport?”
“Yep.”
“Snacks?”
“Yep.”
“A jacket?” Bianca frowned and reached for his bag. “It’s Canada, you know. It’ll get chilly at night. You should have—”
“Mom, I have a jacket.” He caught Bianca’s reaching hands and rolled his eyes, the way only a teenager could. “It’s a field trip with my lacrosse team, not a voyage to the Antarctic. I’ll be with Coach and like fifteen other guys. We’ll be fine.”
“Of course you will.” Bianca patted his cheek with an open affection that had Willa blinking hard at the floor between her boots. “But I’m your mother. Worrying’s my job.”
“Well, don’t.” Matty leaned in, kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back on Thursday.”
“Make sure you are.” Bianca smoothed his t-shirt. “Devil Days starts on Friday and we’ll need all hands on deck.”
“That’s the plan.” He drew back to grin at her. “Okay, gotta go.”
“Travel safe, sweetheart.”
Willa was never quite sure, later, who to blame for what happened next. A number of things happened almost simultaneously. First, a chipmunk bolted out of the wall and into the live trap, its striped tail straight up like a racing pennant. It was willing to die but it was going down with full stomach, by God. It launched itself face-first into the gob of peanut butter with a kamikaze leap that rattled the cage.
Matty gave a startled yelp. Willa jumped off the table and Bianca backed into the stack of boxes beside her, tumbling them to the ground. During this little comedy of errors, at least one person — possibly more than one — kicked the live trap, dislodging it from its cozy hole in the wall. The chipmunk looked up from its peanut butter binge, smelled freedom and made a break for it. Only it mistook Matty’s leg for a tree trunk and raced for the skies.
Matty froze, likely paralyzed by his lack of good options. He seemed reluctant to slap at such tiny bones, which spoke well of his soul, but he was clearly uncomfortable being climbed by a wild animal. He turned wide, panicked eyes on his mother, who apparently didn’t suffer any such qualms. She scooped up a sketchbook from the tumble of papers at her feet, took a double-handed backswing worthy of the LPGA and delivered a blow to Matty’s thigh that would have rendered a less worthy chipmunk unconscious if it didn’t deliver him directly to his ultimate reward.
But this, Willa discovered a split second later, was no ordinary chipmunk. This chipmunk not only survived, but maintained consciousness. It arrowed through time and space like a furry little bullet, a line-drive of furious survival instinct that landed square on Willa’s crotch. She said, “Oh, hell.”
Then those little claws — so handy for tree-climbing — found purchase on Willa’s jeans and suddenly there was a dazed ball of speeding-heart panic inside her t-shirt.
“Jesus!” She indulged in several sweaty seconds of intensely personal self-groping before finally just giving up and ripping the shirt off over her head. She twisted it into a pouch, trapping the chipmunk inside. “Got it!” She held up the wadded t-shirt in triumph, her heart racing, her ball cap on the ground. Only then did she realize that she was now standing in the Davis Gallery in nothing but a pair of dirty jeans and a boob-squashing sports bra, her hair a wild tangle around her shoulders, her ponytail holder having abandoned its post during the fracas. “I, uh, got it.”
CHAPTER 3
BIANCA AND MATTY both stared at her, open-mouthed. Bianca, at least, had the grace to look down at the sketch pad in her hands, then dropped it as if it had burned her. It hit the floor with a bang that broke the spell, and Matty turned to his mother.
“Thanks, Ma.” He grinned. “Always looking out for me.”
Bianca scooped up the sketchbook again and folded it carefully shut. “I’m your mother,” she said lightly. “It’s my job.”
“Concussing chipmunks is in the job description?” Willa asked. She dropped to her knees and deposited her shirt in the live trap. She carefully eased the chipmunk out of the make-shift pouch, dropped the door on the trap and pulled the shirt back on.
“It’s under other duties as necessary,” Bianca murmured, her knuckles white on the sketch pad.
“Well, this has been awesome,” Matty said, still grinning, and rocked back on his big boots. “But I really do have to go now.”
“Have a good time,” Bianca said.
“Yeah, have fun,” Willa told him.
“Will do.”
He kissed his mother’s cheek one more time, and then he was gone, leaving Bianca and Willa ankle-deep in spilled papers and awkward silence.
Finally Willa said, “I’ll put the wall back together then find a new home for the chipmunk.”
“You can’t do that,” Bianca said.
“I can’t?”
“I don’t mean the chipmunk. You can do whatever it is you usually do with the chipmunk.” Bianca shoved the sketchbook into one of the boxes at her feet and straightened to face Willa. “I mean Matty. You can’t look at him that way.”
Willa froze with one hand deep in her duffle bag, rummaging for the wood screws. “What way?” she managed, though her throat was suddenly painfully tight.
“The way you do.”
“I don’t look at him any way. I don’t look at him at all.”
“Most of the time, that’s true.” She inclined her head stiffly. “But sometimes — just now for example — you do. And when you do, it’s…”
“It’s what?”
“It’s obvious.” She drew herself up, peered down her regal nose at Willa. “You need to stop it. For his sake, if not for your own.” She folded her hands at her waist and smiled politely. “I’ll
expect your bill in the mail whenever it’s convenient.”
And then she was gone, leaving Willa alone with her confusion, her pain, and a concussed chipmunk.
“I know how you feel, buddy,” she muttered, and began putting the wall back together when all she wanted was to break something.
An hour later, the chipmunk was halfway to Duluth and Willa was strolling down Main Street toward her truck. She walked slowly, still chewing on the sort-of olive branch Bianca had extended when she spotted Addison Davis. The woman breezed out of the Devil’s Taproom at the end of the next block and Willa’s stomach clenched. Shit. Normally she enjoyed running into Addy but she wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. She needed a few hours — days, weeks, decades? — to consider the cease-fire Bianca had proposed and all the implications thereof.
Maybe she could just say a quick hello, plead a super-busy day and escape. Addy was nothing if not mannerly. It might just work.
Then Georgie Davis strolled out of the bar, too, all six skinny feet of her, her silky-straight, Vogue-ready hair glistening in the sun, her smile an exact replica of her mother’s — cold, sharp and quietly furious. Willa’s hope abandoned her. Addy might cooperate out of pure niceness but Georgie wouldn’t. Georgie hated her, a circumstance that generally didn’t bother Willa. She hated Georgie every bit as much as Georgie hated her. The only difference was that Willa hated Georgie for a very, very good reason whereas Georgie hated Willa as a matter of principle. This was assuming, of course, that you could call hating all things ugly or poor a principle, in which case Willa qualified on both counts.
Then there was the fact that Georgie’s engagement to Willa’s brother Peter had recently imploded spectacularly. Given that Peter ran the taproom, they’d almost certainly just had a public run-in. The wise Zinc would play least-in-sight right now, and Willa was no dummy.
She hung an abrupt right into the Wooden Spoon Diner. She’d buy a sandwich or something. That was a normal dinner-time sort of thing to do. If Addy found her, she could just be like, Oh, hey, buying a sammy, super busy, got to run—
The crack of an open palm meeting somebody’s cheek stopped Willa dead. It was a sound she knew too well to ever mistake for anything else. She had a fleeting moment of craven gratitude that it wasn’t her face in the line of fire this time before her humanity kicked in. She didn’t care who’d done what to whom. She was a healthy, strong adult and refused to stand by gawking while somebody did violence in front of her. It occurred to her in a vague sort of way that in trying to avoid one fight, she’d inadvertently walked into another one.
Today really wasn’t her day, was it?
The real drawback to having your face slapped, Eli Walker mused, was that it made you feel things. And not just the fire racing across his abused cheekbone, either. No, having your face slapped in public opened up that big, putrid pit of shame inside that was always whispering you deserve this. This, and probably worse.
Eli had no argument. If there was a reason he was still walking this earth, whole and healthy, when so many of the men who’d worked beside him were dead, he didn’t know what it was. Nor did he know why Gerte Torsen — the sweet little pie lady of Devil’s Kettle — had just cracked him a good one.
“How dare you?” Gerte breathed, her soft jowls trembling with outrage. Or maybe with the aftershock of that slap she’d laid on him. She’d really put some muscle behind it, Jesus. Not that he should be surprised. He’d bused tables here at the Wooden Spoon Diner for a couple of unremarkable weeks back in the spring, and it had taken him about two shifts to spot the rattlesnake under Gerte’s tourist-friendly veneer. “How dare you show your face here, after what you did?”
Eli touched his throbbing cheek. The whole diner had fallen shoot-out-at-the-OK-corral silent. He raked his memory for anything he might’ve done while in situ that would provoke this kind of fury. He shot a glance toward the kitchen where Gerte’s daughter Lainey ruled. She’d made a pass at him one night after closing, a clear signal to his inner vagabond that it was time to move on. So he’d moved on. It was a simple enough thing to do. You rolled up your sleeping bag, laced up your boots, shouldered your pack and walked out. You didn’t, as a rule, think much — if ever — about what you’d left behind but his throbbing cheekbone was curious. What exactly had Lainey told her mother about the night he’d taken off?
“After what I did?” he prompted. The door jingled behind him and a blast of sticky summer air hit the back of his neck. More spectators, great. “What exactly did I do?”
She slapped him again. Christ. His ear rang and he tasted blood this time. Gerte had herself one hell of a swing. Then again, if he let her slap him hard enough and often enough, would that pool of shame inside him start to drain? Worth thinking about.
“You nearly blew this place to smithereens!” she snapped.
“I did?” He blinked, sincerely shocked. He’d been expecting something more along the lines of dishonoring her daughter, which he hadn’t. Not that Lainey hadn’t lobbied for it.
“What?” she sneered. “You’ve forgotten that your grand exit included torching my Dumpster?”
Behind him, somebody breathed, “Oh hell.”
“Not to mention burning Peter’s resort to the ground!”
Eli held up a staying hand. “Wait, I burned down a resort?” A Dumpster was one thing but a whole resort? “Which one?”
“The Hideaway, Eli! You only slept there every night while you were here?”
He considered the bat-infested squirrel hotel in which he’d parked his sleeping bag for the bare week or two he’d been in town. He supposed it might’ve been a resort. Once. When he’d slept there, it had been an abandoned fire hazard. Evidently, he wasn’t the only one who’d thought so.
“You could’ve just said no.” Gerte’s soft mouth pinched into a damning line. “To Lainey. To what she asked you. That’s what a normal person would have done, you know. A decent person. But not you. Not Eli Walker. Because you’re not decent, are you? You’re poison.”
Her words rang inside him like a bell, sank into his accepting soul like the unvarnished truth they were.
There was an impatient huff behind him and a woman said, “For Christ’s sake, Gerte. Are you still going on about that Dumpster fire? It was months ago, and there wasn’t one penny of damage done to this place. When are you going to get over it already?”
Gerte’s eyes sharpened with dislike on the woman who’d spoken behind him. “When somebody’s guilty butt is in jail,” she said, “and not a minute sooner.”
“So you’re just going to hold impromptu witch hunts every time a stranger passes through?”
Eli turned and found his champion just inside the diner’s glass door. She was smaller than he’d imagined. It took guts to stand up for a total stranger, more when you were just barely this side of tiny. She wore a baggy t-shirt and dirty jeans with boots to match, and a St. Paul Saints cap pulled so low he couldn’t see much more than a pointed pixie chin underneath it. A thick, dark ponytail snaked halfway down her back and the arms she’d folded across her middle looked slender and breakable.
And yet that slippery pool of shame inside him went strangely still. Because this woman — whoever she was — didn’t shift on those sturdy boots of hers. She didn’t blink or smirk or speak. She simply waited for Gerte’s response with a patient calm that spread into the air around her, wrapped itself around the violence of Gerte’s slap, and laid it serenely on the cool cement floor to sleep.
“It’s hardly a witch hunt,” Gerte sniffed, but she stepped back. Out of slapping range, Eli realized with a twinge of relief. “Not when both fires happened within hours of Eli skipping town without a word to anybody.” Those hostile eyes swung back to him. “Aside from the ugly ones that passed between him and Lainey.”
Eli didn’t recall any particularly ugly words, unless you counted no. Which Lainey might. Rejection never felt good.
“Far as I know,” his champion said evenly, “there’
s no law against turning a girl down.”
“What about torching a Dumpster? Burning down a resort?” Gerte continued to glare at him. “He might’ve been behind the Davis Place fire, too, for all we know!”
The other woman didn’t blink. And that eerie, watchful stillness of hers only deepened. “That happened, what, a solid month after the other fires? You think he waited until the heat was off, sneaked back into town and did one more, just for fun?” She let that sink in. “You’re reaching, Gerte.”
“I’m not saying he did it himself.” Gerte lifted her chin. “But he definitely gave somebody ideas.”
The woman stared at her for a long moment, then finally moved. She flicked her cap back far enough to drag a weary palm down her face. “Okay, listen, Gerte. Listen, all of you.” She glanced around the room, took in their avid audience. “I’m only going to say this once and I want all of you to pay attention. This man—” She stopped, pointed at him. “What’s your name?”
“Eli,” he said. “Eli Walker.”
“Great. Hi, Eli.”
“Hey.”
“Eli Walker didn’t start any fires. The fire marshall examined both the Dumpster and the Hideaway. The sheriff was consulted. Peter — my brother, mind you, and the owner of record on both properties? He’s dealt with his insurance company, the fire marshall and the sheriff. Everybody’s satisfied and the cases are closed. Gerte’s got no cause to accuse anybody of anything, let alone the right.”
She made hard eye contact with three or four individuals — high value social targets, he imagined — and Eli watched their eyes slide guiltily away from hers.
She was good, whoever she was. He had to wonder why she was spending whatever social capital she had for a stranger, though.
“As for Davis Place?” She nailed Gerte with the eye contact this time. “That one was my fault.”
Gerte’s mouth dropped open and an audible gasp filled the room. “You burned down Davis Place?”
“Not on purpose, Gerte, geez. Get a hold of yourself.” She waited a beat, as if giving Gerte a moment to truly get back in touch with reason. As if she had every confidence that, because she’d given an order, it would be obeyed. And something in Eli yearned.
